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Understanding the Payoffs From Investing In Space Flight
A story at MSNBC.com explains how the technological benefits reaped from investing in the US space program are numerous, but often indirect or difficult to explain. Quoting:
"NASA has recorded about 1,600 new technologies or inventions each year for the past several decades, but far fewer become commercial products, said Daniel Lockney, technology transfer program executive at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. ... 'We didn't know that by building the space shuttle main engines we'd also get a new implantable heart device,' Lockney said. 'There's also a bunch of stuff we don't know we're going to learn, which leads to serendipitous spinoffs.' ... But some innovations do not appear as a straight line drawn from NASA to commercial products. The U.S. space agency may not claim credit for computers and the digital revolution that followed, but it did create a pool of talent that perhaps contributed to that transformation of modern life. NASA brought together hundreds of the brightest scientists and engineers in the 1970s to work on the guidance computers that helped the Apollo missions land humans on the moon. When the Apollo era ended, many of those people dispersed to private companies and to Silicon Valley."
If they were allowed to put their logo on everything they were involved in, then people would start to realize how important they are. Nothing garish, just something like the tiny UL logo you see on everything.
An ad campaign like the Army's would also help.
..is measured in what we won't produce and is therefore something we will never known.
If you're going to credit NASA for all the things the people they trained did after they left NASA, you also have to count against NASA all the things those people would have done had they not worked for NASA. True, if you're going to weigh the costs of the space program against the benefits, you have to include all the benefits. But you have to include all the costs too. NASA drained the country of engineering and scientific talent that could have, and would have, done many other things.
Sometime around 350 AD the Roman Empire was in dire straights. The Emperor sent his young nephew to be Ceasar of Gaul. The first order of business for this young Ceasar was to smash pockets of rebellion, the second was to collect desperately needed taxes.
This young Ceasar did smash the rebellion. He also _lowered_ taxes, and focused on collected a reasonable tax from everyone. As a result, the Gauls loved him and paid their taxes. Tax revenue not only went up, it virtually exploded. This young Ceasar found himself both rich and loved by both his troops and his subjects, who pushed him to declare war on his Uncle and take over the empire. This he did, aided by his Uncle's untimely death just days before combat at the gates of Byzantium.
This new Emperor become known as Julian the Apostate by the Christians, or Julian the Helen by the Jews. Flavius Claudius Julianus knew more about taxation and running an empire than our current President, or the parent of this thread for that matter.
You have to look at the opportunity cost with things like this. All new research and development has unintended benefits. And NASA has been such a pork loaded boondoggle lately, it's hard to believe the money couldn't have been better spent. I realized today that the entire I405 improvement project cost as much as 1 space shuttle launch. And no new science comes out of launching the space shuttle, they've been doing that for 30 years. To put it bluntly, there's no way the cost of 115 space shuttle launches could have been worth benefits.
Yes, because Hubble was such a horrible failure. Why would we ever want to repeat that...
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One of the problems with this argument is it ignores the very simple concept of "opportunity cost". That is, what else could we have done with the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in the space program over the last few decades? If it's commercially useful technologies you want, for instance, I strongly suspect you'd get a whole lot more of them by simply giving the National Science Foundation a whole lot more money to fund scientific research, rather than funding the development of technologies specifically related to space flight, only a small fraction of which will find commercial applicability elsewhere. Space science and engineering, particularly that relating to crewed missions, should be funded or not funded on its own merits, rather than relying on arguments about better toasters and pacemaker batteries. They're a useful bonus, and advocates should treat them as such.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
So, hey - it turns out that the problems of widespread rebellion and overtaxation are different in kind from the problems of under-taxation and repressive government policies. Who would have thunk that different problems require different solutions?
I mean, I could quote any number of irrelevant historical situations - but shit, who has the time for worthless endeavors. Short version - in our own history, the same trends we're seeing now (rampant power transfer to corporate entities, drops in collected revenue, reduced regulation) during the Gilded Age led directly into the worst depression the country has ever suffered. OH SNAP IT'S A RELEVANT HISTORICAL PRECEDENT! RUN! IT'S GOING TO GET YOU!